The road between fights

Written up later from the repo's history and dated to the days it describes.

The first act of The Lien ends in a gauntlet called The Yard, four fights in a row against men who block the way. For a long time the gap between those fights was a win panel with one "Keep going" button. On October 4 the operator wrote down an idea in an issue: a scene where the wanderer walks a place and walks up to people, started the way the juke joint's people are, with a prompt and an Interact. "It would look and feel a lot better in this format for the gauntlet."

The moment after a fight

Before the road, the button itself changed. A result band replaced the dimmed centered panel, and the advance became a click anywhere or Enter or Space and locked briefly after the fight ends. After a fight the enemy plays its death, the hand and the End Turn button and Argos's tray leave, and the band appears at the bottom with the result word and the gold. That work shipped first because the road needed a clean seam to plug into. It also closed two open issues about the old panel.

A spike, with a deletion plan

The road began as a spike, and the spec said how it would be judged. By hand, does walking up to the fight beat tapping through the seam? If not, delete the files. It was built so that deleting it meant deleting new files and a few marked lines, and only a debug scenario could reach it. The live game could not.

It reused what the juke joint already had, the walker, the ground plane, the collision and the figure fitting. One screen holds one man, standing in the right third, and the wanderer starts at the left. The line that describes the next man plays when you walk up to him, not when you win, because the authored lines describe the man who comes next. The gauntlet has four fights and three lines, so the first man has none, and one Interact starts his fight.

The first try had a single background for every fight, so the road looked the same each time. The operator's verdict on it was that it needed its own background. The fix was a plate per man, a gin yard, a commissary, a row of tenant houses and a church, so that the walk passes a set of houses. The church plate is the one exception in the notes.

Promotion, and what was deleted

The operator passed the spike by hand on October 5, and it went live the same day. Several decisions in the promotion are worth keeping.

Plates stay tied to a fight's position and not to the man. The men are rolled from the Battle tier, so they vary run to run, and the authored lines vary by position too. The four plates were painted to sit behind those positional lines, so keying plates to the man would break the one pairing that holds. What can still mismatch is a line against the figure in front of it, which was already true before the road.

The road is the start of all four fights. The alternative was to go straight into battle for fight one and use the road only between fights, which would never show the gin yard. A befriended Argos walks the road beside the wanderer, because he fights from his own tray in battle and would otherwise vanish between fights.

The between-fight receipt was dropped. Gold is banked in the battle scene on the win itself, before the band is built, so skipping the band lost a display and not a payout.

The old tap seam was retired rather than kept as a fallback. With the road as the only way through a live gauntlet, the tap button would be code nobody reaches and nobody tests by hand, and this repo's own notes have a lesson about that kind of code. The flag that marked the spike was deleted too, since inside a gauntlet it would always be true. The promotion also added a failure exit. A road with no active gauntlet used to log an error and show a blank scene. It now clears the bundle and returns to the map, and a test pins it.

The numbers are still first guesses. The man renders 8 to 13 percent smaller on the road than in the fight, measured on the real art, so he gets bigger as the fight starts. The composition is for the next smoke pass to tune.